Monday, September 29, 2014

Sedentary lifestyles
account for a lot of health problems, especially in urban areas where people
make their living in buildings. Our bodies are made for motion. One reason our
leg muscles are large is that self locomotion has been a requirement since the
beginning of time. Even after equines were domesticated, we continued to hone
our lower extremities in catching, taming and riding the animals. Yes, it takes
leg power to ride a horse, donkey, camel, elephant or mule. When the internal
combustion engine came along, many of our lifestyles changed from active to
sedentary almost overnight. But savvy people still understood that we must use
our muscle power or lose it, so healthful activities such as walking, cycling,
running and climbing became lifesavers. No, we don’t have to be devoted to
exercise regimens to get the healthful benefits of leg motion. We can take the
stairs, park further away from our workplace and participate in recreational
activities that require movement.

The elevator and
escalator have their place in very tall buildings and airports, but it does not
take much more time to take the stairs. And the time lost is balanced by the
benefit of climbing to our hearts and respiratory systems. If you are not
accustomed to taking the stairs, you should start slow, maybe just one flight
the first week, adding additional flights as time goes by. Gradually increasing
the number of flights of stairs you take will result in more stamina and more
endorphins, those little chemicals that make for a happier work day. Have you
noticed that people who are more physically active seem happier and better
adjusted?

Parking further away
from work or getting off the bus or subway at a distance and walking will
result in similar benefits. This adjustment in lifestyle will result in the
need for walking shoes and raingear that you can stow at the workplace, keeping
a good pair of work-appropriate shoes on hand there. Often, when city people
walk further to work, they discover neat little shops or cafes that they did
not know existed. Some even make new friends and look forward to morning and
evening conversations along the way. There is something about the rhythm of
walking that enhances conversation and makes us more voluble.

Finally, there are many
recreational activities that require leg use. My personal favorite is
bicycling, though I do not enjoy that activity in traffic. Thus, I look for
peaceful bike routes. Most cities have well lighted trails with scenic stops
that are seldom congested. If you look for them, you will find them. Otherwise,
investing in a mountain bike and riding off-road where there is no motorized
traffic can be a relaxing and muscle-building hobby.

So, since modern
American urban society is skewed against use of our leg muscles, we have to
find ways to keep them active and operating the way they were designed. Finding
venues such as climbing stairs, walking further and having fun outside, will
have positive benefits upon our physical health as well as our mental
well-being.

Thursday, September 25, 2014

Monday, September 22, 2014

I paid the exact same
amount for a bass fiddle and a 1946 Dodge when I was in high school: $96. The
bass fiddle was in good shape, but I painted it black and white and put
sparklers on it so it would look cool in the Hi Fis, our dance band. The Dodge,
however, was in bad shape. I should have known that the clanking and slow
acceleration were signs something was not right when I test drove it. But I
liked the looks of it—like a giant dung beetle. It was maroon and it looked as
if someone had painted it that color with a brush.

The guys in the Hi Fis
loved that car. It was a four-door and we could all fit into it, five of us,
even with the bass fiddle looming in the middle, with the neck almost hitting
the front windshield and the pike against the back one. We could get the drum
set in what we used to call the turtle-hull and the other instruments graced
the floorboard. My musician friends looked like sardines in a tin as we took
off to our gigs around Union County and Lincoln Parish.

One of my favorite
events we entertained for was a big birthday bash for some executives of an oil
company in my town. The daddy of our trumpet player was the big honcho, so we
got the gig. There was a huge buffet involved, so we growing boys got plenty of
caloric in-take that evening as we took musical requests. The trumpeter could
play anything by ear and he would call out the key to the others in the band.
We would find it, sort of, and join in. One good thing about the bass fiddle
was that I could fake it if I got lost. I would just deaden the vibrations with
my left hand instead of actually playing notes. Thus, I became part of the
percussion section at those moments and no one seemed to notice, even my Hi Fi
colleagues.

But, as to that Dodge,
it threw a rod on one of our outings and we towed it to a vacant lot near my
house. My admired adult mentors thought it would be good for me to fix the car,
so I set to work. When I dropped the oil pan, lo, pieces of the cam shaft and
cylinder wall floated in a shallow pool of black. I told my big brother, an
adult I assumed had good sense, and he advised me to save up some money and
order a rebuilt engine from a catalog he loaned me. I did so, paying
considerably more for the motor than I had paid for the car itself. A taciturn friend
named Lamar, who was a natural mechanic, helped me drop the engine in there. I
drove it two weeks before the rear-end fell out and then all my mentors,
including my big brother, said, “You ought to sell that hunk of junk.” That
advice would have been more apropos before I bought the dumb engine. Anyway, I
was able to recoup some money, but overall, it was a bad deal.

Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Young children love
structure in their games. Don’t you think that structure is the main reason
games such as “Mother May I” and “Hide and Seek” have been so popular with
young people for so long? Kids in my family want rules and they want them enforced.
My children were that way and so are my grandchildren. Games reinforce their
sense of justice and fair play. Later in life, when it is time for baseball,
sportsmanship is in place and they insist on abiding by the rules. Playing by
the rules enhances self-esteem, in that, even in defeat, a player can take
pride in an honest loss.

As a child, I played
baseball with insufficient equipment in vacant lots, with bases made of rags or
ply-board or even rocks. The younger or less athletic kids would volunteer to
be umpires and what they said went, not without some controversy. But we loved
the structure and abided by the way the game was supposed to be played. We
might throw a fit, but the rules ruled!

Free-form games like “Sling-the-Statue”
were not nearly as popular because of the infinite variations possible. Win or
lose, we wanted anticipated outcomes. Our sense of security and community
demanded it.

Likewise, more
sedentary adults like games with a similar form of structure with well-defined rules.
Consider the crossword puzzle page, Sudoku or Cryptoquotes. These mental games
require considerable conformity so that honest completion brings a kind of
catharsis.

In literature, game
rules such as formulae and forms have been ever popular, all the way from the
limerick to the sonnet. Even Shakespeare had a formula for all his great
tragedies: there was always a war in the background; there were always
conflicted lovers; there was always great disorder culminating in a terrific sword-fight
in the last act; and some important official always restored order at the end.

The famous romantic
poet, William Wordsworth, even wrote a sonnet about writing sonnets in which he
observed that “Nuns fret not in their convent’s narrow room.” The analogy was
to the “narrow room” of the sonnet form, 14 lines of iambic pentameter with a
set rhyme scheme, not an easy form to manage.

The villanelle is perhaps
the most intricate poetic form and the most difficult to write with its
restrictive rhyme scheme and strategically placed repetitions. Two of my
favorite villanelles are Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”
and Roethke’s “The Waking.” The form of these poems plays a huge role in the
overall effect.

Even this column has a
kind of form and formula. I try to keep it to 500 words more or less and I
strive to give it a little twist at the end. So, all the way from “Mother May I”
to newspaper columns, there is a form upon which thought rides. The writer
hopes that his art will hide the formula and that the thought will shine. After
all, there is something satisfying about baseball well played.